Be The Change: Are you a part of the problem or the solution?

I’m no fan of pie-in-the-sky dreaming.

Of reductionist thought that answers the real problems of real people in the real world with deeper truth platitudes that end discussion and leave people foundering, sullen and silently fuming as their issues are relegated to meaninglessness in the face of the absolute. This is not to say that being aware of the absolute truth of reality is problematic. Rather, it is to say that confronting the limited and material truths of our reality with the Absolute is not a solution, but is instead a communicative, verbal and vibratory weapon often designed to overwhelm less eternal truths.

An example of this is saying that race does not matter because we are all human. Most people do believe this is true. But bringing this truth up in a conversation about the Israeli/Palestinian problem, or the issue of black incarceration in the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States does not forward the discussion, nor does it offer any practical solutions that can be implemented in the resolution of the problem.

Solutions are what are needed. Heart-centered solutions that speak to the necessity of all people to have their sovereign rights as incarnate souls respected. This is  a basic human right of existence that cannot be gainsayed by any political ideology, philosophical treaties or religious creed.

The good news is that hearts and minds are opening daily. That consciousness is spreading like wildfire across the world as the inter connectivity provided by the internet becomes the ubiquitous mode of communication for the majority of the world’s citizens. Seeking solutions and salvation beyond the self in groups and institutions must be accompanied by a search for solutions within each of us for our own problems and issues. There can be no real movement for peace and unity when we do not each individually possess those qualities within ourselves.

A slight qualification of the above statement is in order: there can be such movements and have been and probably will be, but those movements will be corrupted at their heart and soul if those who comprise the movement are corrupted in their hearts and souls. The body of membership of any organization is the sum of that membership, inculcating their dreams and desires, which then become the mission and purpose of the group. No matter what their stated principles are, the words and actions of the group will reflect the collective will of their membership, manifesting even their unconscious dreams and desires, masked beneath an rhetorical facade that usually only pays lip service to the ideology publically espoused.

This is why politicians are always caught with their pants down and their bank accounts open, their integrity compromised. This is why corporate raiders and profiteers are concerned primarily with the bottom line, lining their pockets with obscene bonuses and wondering why anybody would complain. This is why preachers and priests do terrible things to children and the emotionally compromised. This is why we hate ourselves, secretly in our inner hearts and souls, desperately seeking salavation outside of ourselves because to look within and actually do something about what we find there is too painful to work with directly.

It’s all well and good to speak words of wisdom or quote the spiritual and philosophical masters and enlightened ones when that sharing is done in the spirit of giving and not in the spirit of taking. In this sense, taking praise from others, likes from the multitude, the verbal praise of having something that others lack, of being able to see into the heart of  situations and to share what is seen there in an empathic and seemingly loving manner is a gift of the spirit and can be easily recognized for its resonance factor and embodiment of higher energetic frequencies. Conversely, doing such in the context of a personal battle of wills or in the making of points that emphasize an individual and egoistic attachment to self-gratification through the adulation of the hoi polloi serve to densify and further stratify personality in a hierarchical and energetically vampiric structure of vanity and egoism. Differentiating between these two types of expression is a stark but necessary maneuver for those who seek to recognize the real from the facade. Platitudes and truisms used as weapons in order to win an argument or in response to a perceived slight on the part of others are platitudes and truisms used in vain.

They are indicative of BEingness that is self-centered and ego-centric. Granted, that consciousness may be and probably is on the road of spiritual and philosophical enlightenment, but in that particular instance they have been waylaid by the intellect of ego and the densification of anger, affront or judgement, which renders their judgement faulty. This is a condition of creation and material incarnation and there is no fault in living in the real and being cognizant of the process of gradual evolution, which is indeed a process, meaning, it does not happen instantaneously for most people. It takes a while to grow and learn through experience how to truly become wise instead of just appearing so.

The solutions to all of the world’s problems are already known. The way to get there has already been laid out. The world’s problems are the same as each of our individual problems, just magnified and fractalized at a larger scale of macrocosmic occurrence. It is in the application of this knowledge to ourselves that we fail to apply the solutions that the world needs. And it will only be when we begin as a collective to recognize our individual failings and the interconnectivity of all consciousness that we will understand that by helping ourselves we are indeed helping the world.

The change begins with each of us. It has already begun and is well in progress. Are you a part of the solutions? Or a part of the problem?

Make a difference. Beyond the platitudes and quotes, we must indeed be the change we want to see in the world. Words must lead to actions in order for the shift to be actualized and manifest for us and our children and our children’s children to enjoy a world based upon a very different paradigm than the one that is failing around us in this very moment.

Obliterating Anger and Fear

Written, May 5, 2007. A window into the past, interesting to re-read in light of my present. I thank Divinity for all of my blessings, my experiences, my life. My love, my children, always close to my heart and soul, never distant from me and in my thoughts daily. May God’s will be done.

Wind whipping, the smell of a verdant early summer, honeysuckles and flowers blooming, the road thrumming beneath my bike tires, a truck of redneck college students pass, the passenger leans out and screams, hoping to scare me. I smile – a grimace, actually – not shook, shaken or stirred, then notice that the stoplight ahead is red. Turning green they turn, my heart boils and legs churn, cause like fools they’ve stopped at the gas station and I make that fateful choice, to follow suit to share with them my voice, my boistrous and most vicious salutation.

Screaming, cursing I follow one in who blames his brothers, his face blanching, fidgeting, saying it wasn’t him, it must have been his friend. Intent, but recognizing the lie inside i follow his lead nonetheless and, screaming and cursing, I head back outside to accost their numb, dumb-ass sensibilities, my 6’4, 230 pound ass glowering and hovering, demanding an accounting as they act like the cowards they are. Their denials are laughable trials and I chuckle silently, returning within to the original, lying-ass, perpetrating fiend I scream, “You lucky i’m a grown ass man, mothafucka or else I’d take yo’ ass out”, to his head-shaking mortified fear, ignoring me as if I wasn’t the butt of his dangerous joke just 2 minutes before. Heading out I ride into traffic again, across the busy thoroughfare and home, where turmoil lives and breathes, and the noise and drama, love and souls boiling over steams, pristine in its mean, unadulterated glory.

Passed my orals and proposal defense and now I’m ABD, about to be free, at least in part, I’m a bit at ease. Free of what, I wonder sometimes, because freedom is just a state of mind. Where have I been, where have my thoughts rested, my desires and dreams born of a stream of visions and portents brought about by discontent, wondering how life brought me here and why I allow fear to pass through me resting momentarily but long enough to ease my thoughts into deep, deep patterns of disease and malcontent. That’s truly bent y’all and yet the spirit recognizes the call, I hear it daily, hourly and momentarily, my faith is stong and I know that nothing really goes wrong. Living that truth is something else, despite the fall of emotions into our daily selves, actions speak for themelves, the reality of the Now a secret promise to Self to awaken at a moment’s call, to pull back from the brink and hope your momentum stalls.

The other day I lost my magnetic bracelet my mama gave me cause I was beating against the side of a bus that wouldn’t stop, leading to a shouting match with a bus commander cop type that didn’t like me hitting on his vehicles, while I, the student who pays his wages gets left in the dusty poison late, for what, an unimportant date that ain’t the point anyway, cause I’m talking about my mama’s bracelet, magnetic, sensitive to emotional electro-magnetic output and it left me that day, and most certainly found it’s way to a soul more at ease, and while I miss it most certainly, I dream that bracelet’s free to realize it’s destiny away from me.

Grounded in life my emotions surge, i seek out strife and shout out to the sky, wanting to smash through the glass window and run outside naked in the rain, my tears mingling with my pain and my joy, that happy core that lives eternally inside of me that sings while the screaming fills my ears and shrill laughter makes fun of my fears all the while dancing to the beat of wide open skies thrumming to the booming cloud drums passing by leaving me high, high and crooning to the moon like a loon, chuckling and finally noticing that I’m in the middle of town buck nekkid looking like a clown my silly-ass grin portending an awakening from a dream, I mean it seems like I’m living some other life sometimes, as if I fell into a coma and woke up on the wrong side of night, my antimatter reality a song I sing to keep my soul clean casting dirt and detritus to the side while I ready myself for the bumpy part of the ride.

And it’s coming y’all, I can feel it right now, in the air, beneath the electric static of the tv, the redneck boys screaming like me, karma coming back on they asses immediately and, like a vengeful banshee I’m on it, the scorpion scorpio in me grinning with unholy glee, seeking expression and an opening through which to flee its cage, deep inside my mind but beyond, intertwined with spirit and soul, totally aware that the goal is his demise, hence his powerful presence in my life.

Waking to tommorrow’s problems I growl and leap inside, knowing that, no matter what, my blessings are as remorseless as the tide, that giving my life to divinity frees me to be, letting go of worry and fear, which is KEY.

Watching the multiverse work to my benefit is like feeling a curse lifting, seeing the piano falling, suddenly stalling then jerking to one side to be the nightmare in somebody else’s life. Recognizing karma’s interplay and not playing into the creation of new debt is like a bet made in a past life, the payment’s come due in the momentary absolution of neverending strife. Being the witness while engaging in controlled folly the amusement of godlings, the proof of the divine line merging into Oneness, my rage a stage of recognition, the power of play a pending premonition.

But y’all don’t hear me though. One more time around the playground and we’ll all meet at the merry-go-round, swinging and shouting, eyes closed leaning and spinning! Life is posed upon the brink of eternity, our souls are glowing with the light of infinity this joy growing and bursting from the very heart of me, I offer to you as a cure for your blues, to this incarnation, we must ALL be true.  Night falls and children’s prayers offered aloft ring out, echoing  in my ears, past the  drone of  computerized lies, these eyes opened wide to the contradictions, inside. So hum with me as the spiritual glides, the old one hundreds sung as the spirits moan and cry, wishing life upon us all, death’s coming, so we better stand tall.

Peace and Blessings to the journey, I offer libations to the Ancestors in the gloaming, twilight’s birthing, our earthen delight.

The Future-Past Manifest: Honoring the genetic cellular database

Who we are individually is the question at the core of all paths leading toward spiritual growth. The Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece had written above its main portal a simple dictate: Know Thyself. The encouragement implied by this statement is among the deepest truths yet known to human-kind. Whether it be Kemetian Sages, African traditionalists, Gnostics of the Judaic, Christian or Islamic persuasion, Wiccan adherents, Hindu or Buddhist practitioners, knowledge of Self has always been considered to be the key to Enlightenment.

But what the Self is has been a contentious topic in philosophy, psychology and religion. Determinations of differentiation between the ego and the Self have resulted in the delineation of different forms of consciousness residing within one body. Spiritual traditions the world across have discovered and explored the causal, astral and higher forms of consciousness that we hold in common despite where we come from. Psychologists have come to accept the existence of an ego, an id, super-id and a collective unconscious.  The higher aspects of spiritual being-ness comprise the Self, while the lower aspects of material being-ness comprise the self. All of these understandings combine in ascending order to comprise a holistic unity of consciousness with varying degrees of accessibility by the normal, waking or egoistic construct that we call our personality.

Whether we should give more attention to some deity outside of ourselves has been the oppositional yet concurrent thread running through the historical record of human spiritual aspiration. Cultures around the world are at their cores primeval expressions of consciousness interacting in matter with the world. Environmental conditions in different climate regions play a role in determining the types of religious structures that you find. Ethnic religions are generally unique and spatially distinct, while Universal religions span the globe. Projecting consciousness within upon the world without results in the formulation of nature deities that live in streams, in forests, in mountains, in the skies and below the ground. Explanations about what happens after death sooth the predominant fear that threatens ever. As evolution of the worldly cycles continue on in ever-repeating spirals of matter progressing through time, so birth, death and rebirth become constant themes in human societies.

The evolution of culture, then, is an expression of both collective and individual interaction and intention imposed upon a sub-stratum of fundamental reality that is virtually inaccessible by egoistic perception. Because of the intense conditioning that proceeds from birth onward by family, friends and society, each individual is indoctrinated into how the world should be seen and defined. These definitions then make up the totality of a person’s perception of the world.

Because of the differences in cultural evolution across the world, people from different geographic locations perceive the world in sometimes subtly and sometimes grossly different ways. Spiritual ideals held in common across the human family express themselves according to the importance applied to them by individual cultures. For Hindus, reincarnation occurs as a form of spiritual evolution within the context of a hierarchical caste system based upon class and race. For Africans, reincarnation occurs as a form of spiritual evolution within the context of immediate and extended family.

Genetics and spirituality are contentious topics when examined alone. When taken together, their potential to cause trouble, predictably, doubles. The drive of the Nazi Third Reich was more than a xenophobic expression of nationalism, it was a spiritual movement designed to crown a “Master Race”, enthroned upon the bones of the sub-human masses. The world-wide expansion of Christianity from Europe into the Americas and Africa was driven in large part by a European zeitgeist of pre-supposed racial and cultural superiority. Smaller, less universal religions that people are born into such as Hinduism and Judaism are notoriously ethnocentric and strict in their determination of who is righteous and who is not. And yet, despite the inherent dangers of mixing genetics and spirituality, the unified nature of reality demands some acknowledgement of the fundamental interrelationship of all phenomena as being integrally intertwined.

There is only one human race. There are many ethnicities that span the gamut in varieties of skin color, sizes, shapes and temperaments. No individual is bound to stereotypical behavior because each possesses free will and is responsible for his or her own outcomes. This truth cannot be overstated. We are souls on a human journey.

Religion and spirituality as expressions of collective ethical aspiration agree in the assignation of responsibility to the individual. Each person must achieve his or her own spiritual advancement primarily through behavior-change. Behavior-change can proceed either from the adherence to group norms, or from a shift in intention and thought on the part of the individual. By adhering to group norms, an individual does not have to change his or her thought processes. She or he only has to act the way others act in order to conform. By shifting intention and thought, by contrast, a person’s behavior automatically changes to reflect their new mental state. The Self seeks to shift intention and thought, approaching the highest spiritual expression, while self seeks the gratification of ego and the needs of the reptilian brain, which are imminently material and worldly in nature and have to do with fear and security. The Self which seeks spiritual attainment is individualized and responsible to higher principles and the evolution of the soul, while the self which seeks security and comfort is the personal manifestation of group norms and irrevocably tied to the world.

Conforming to group norms is how stereotypes are created and evolve. Coming into the American zeitgeist through the southern states and slavery, Blacks in America of necessity were limited to certain types of cheap and abundant food sources, chicken and watermelon being among these. Individually, people have varied likes and dislikes and yet because of their group-identification, they may be stereotyped as to these personal choices to a greater or lesser degree. The stereotype of Asians as being inscrutable may have more to do with an erroneous perception based upon both cultural and physiological differences between Asians and Caucasians, primarily having to do with less demonstrative cultures and the epicanthic fold. These superficial determinations are primarily material and irrelevant. Of greater import is the recognition of the continuation of genetic streams of karmic responsibility at the personal and collective level.

Given the difficulty in determining truth from falsehood when considering the heavily manipulated historical record of the human family, it serves little purpose to speculate as to the nature of original causation, or, who did what to who first, when and why. All that is necessary is to look at the world as it currently exists, the position of different peoples and cultures around the world and the nature of immediate, potential future time-lines. The Future-Past Manifest is an inexorable machination of Divine will as expressed materially through time and across space, as each intention, thought and action recorded in the collective unconscious seeks its resolution. What has been birthed what is and what is will form what is to be. The ideal of karma – or, reaping the whirlwind in the Judeo-Christian vernacular – serves well as an expression of the natural law declaring the outcome of equal and opposite actions and reactions.

Those who conform to group norms accept culpability in group behavior. The karmic destiny of their chosen group is an acceptable one. The safety and comfort the self experiences by being a part of a larger group outweighs questions of morality and karmic debt. On the other hand, deviating from group norms and shifting intention and thought to reflect a more individuated and soul-based expression of Self as opposed to self releases individuals from the group. Of course, there are groups within groups, as individuals conform to greater or lesser degrees, all existing within one, super-group that is comprised of the entirety of the human, earth-bound family.

For the individual, recapitulating one’s life – going through the memory banks and seeking clarity regarding conformity or non-conformity to the highest potentiality of each experience – results in a clear understanding of the original question pertaining to who we are. From there, taking a sober accounting of our present circumstances, our relationships, jobs, family, our states of mind, desires and needs, reveals the current constellation of our perceived responsibilities as well as the potential path forward. Partaking of the norms of our chosen groups links us to those groups in simple and complex ways: from the neighborhoods that we live in to the entertainments that we enjoy, from the people we vote for to the unspoken prejudices we share with friends, all of these choices bind us in time and space to other people and groups and to genetic and cultural ways of being-ness that are, in truth, illusory and digressive from the lesser-traveled paths of individuated spiritual attainment.

For many, being bound to the genetic and social groups of our primary life-experiences is a satisfactory outcome. That choice is honorably made by the majority of those who follow the wide highway of material and spiritual evolution, as the traffic is heavy, the destination ponderous, ritualistic and seemingly irresistible. Following the Self’s often-subtle encouragement to explore for ourselves, to seek out a different way, to look for that which lies beyond the simple and stereotypical facade, is a quiet choice, one often drowned out by the boisterous sub-vocal exhortations of the self and the external imperatives of the group.

Whatever the path we each choose, individually, it is the correct choice. The gene code is the expression of our ancestral lineages, up the wending path of the evolutionary ladder, to the present day. Each ancestor contributed fundamentally to who each of us is, right this moment. Each of them is still with us, hidden within the dna spirals of our body, right this moment. Our genetic codes, as an expression of life’s fundamental imperative to seek the highest potential outcome of each individual path, require us to honor Creation by our very presence and soundness of mind and body, which is all the encouragement needed for us to manifest all of who we are in each moment of our lives. We are each where we are supposed to be, no soul is better than another, no path is better than the other, just different.

To know thyself is a worthy goal, promising bounties beyond conception, experiences beyond the mundane. To seek to manifest the sublime aspects of spiritual attainment by going within to find the knowledge of Self is to seek the path less traveled, winding up steep paths into the light-enhanced heights of awareness and potentiality, seeking the unity of the material and the spiritual, beyond desire, pain or need. Choose well.

Transitions: Ego at the crossroads

A deserted crossroads, stretching into infinity, tableaued upon a broad and dusky plain, uninterrupted by terrain variablity. Flat, expressionless, the crossroad forms a cross of infinite length, within the center of which lies a core of eternity. An old, black man, skin dark, smoking a cigar and hoisting an expensive bottle of rum sits there, waiting for you. And me. He is Papa Legba. The Guardian of the Crossroads.

Transitions are represented by the Crossroads, in many spiritual traditions. In Vodun, the Crossroads are the domain of the Lwa, Papa Legba, or Elegua are western representatives of the African Orisha, Eshu. This diety’s domain is the doorway between the mortal and the spiritual world, the revelation of the veiled sight called prophecy and is the first and last to be invoked in ceremonies dealing with communications between this and the Other Side.

Many different types of transitions can occur simultaneously in life. The ending of a semester, the evolution of relationships. The growth of children and the continuous cycling of world affairs. We all experience transitions differently. My past as an air force brat has affected the way that I experience transitions in a fundamental manner; a manner which I’m not sure is totally positive.

Transitions were always an exciting time, growing up. From birth until my sophomore year in HS, my family moved every two years like clockwork. From my birthplace in Paducah, Tejas, to Bangor, Maine, and Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire by the time I was 3. From there to Wichita Falls, back in Texas, then out to Cali at Nevado, then outside of Vallejo, at Travis AFB to 5 years of age (first UFO sightings here). From there, back to Tejas, Paducah, grandparents, aunts uncles and cousins until we moved to Biloxi, Mississippi in preparation for our 2 year sojourn on the island of Crete, Greece, where we stayed until  I was 10.  Del City, Oklahoma and Tinker AFB and  Scott AFB in Illinois, where we lived in both O’Fallon and  also on the AFB – went to school off-base at Mascoutah HS – brought me into the HS years, and then we moved to Washington State and Fairchild AFB, not far to the west of Spokane. We stayed there for 3 years. My father extended his tour there by a year so I could graduate from HS in the same school.

Moving so much made it easy for me to let people go. The excitement of the move, the thrill of new places, new spaces, new friends, the possibility of being whoever you wanted to be and not having to worry about your past catching up with you were unconscious benefits of a life lived moving forward, hardly ever looking back. The first time I felt real remorse at leaving a place, and people, wasn’t until after we moved from Oklahoma, at which point I missed a close friend whom I still look for sometimes on the Net, hoping to see his name in lights, because he was a magnificent artist, at such a tender age, and taught me much that girds my artistic endeavors to this day.

Military brats didn’t write each other often, to my knowledge. We just moved on. Sometimes we saw others that we knew before in new places, most times not. The ability to live fully in the present and the future, to some extent, is either a gift or curse that arises from this kind of lifestyle. And I realize that there are many other people out there who have lived in such a transitory manner, moving as often or more often, for different reasons. I believe that the military lifestyle is singular though, in that sense, because you are moving within a very formal and self-contained structure, so there is a similarity of outlook and experience amongst those who grow up in that lifestyle: there are commisaries and BX’s on every base, a bowling alley, gym, recreational facilities (lakes, rivers, ski resorts, parks, golf courses, trips, tours, clubs) and excellent educational opportunities available to us that really aren’t available to people of a similar economic and social status in other walks of life.

I remember every few years, the Air Force would send my father home with a comparative chart, and we would sit around the table exclaiming at the benefits that we had access to, and the comparison to civilian equivalents always left us at least 10 to 20 thousand dollars higher on the economic ladder than the actual amount of money my father was making. Being an enlisted man (Non-commissioned officer, lower ranking) for half his career, then finishing school and going to OCS for the second half of his career allowed us, his children, to experience ‘both sides’ of the military hierarchy, the lower and upper, and to transition effortlessly between different types of people, of different experiences and economic backgrounds outside of the military fold.

So, transitions have always seemed to come easily to me. And yet, my nature is fixed, according to the Zodiac, and I tend to hold on to things inside. Not necessarily physical things, or places, but the memories of people, of events, which is something that we all do. It seems to be all that we truly have sometimes, as the vagaries of life send us tossed and turning, flailing helpless in the winds of change to then be dropped into the ocean of despair, then borne atop the frothing crests of all-consuming waves of experience that leave nothing but emotional and spiritual detritus in their corpse-strewn wakes.

A traveler crosses the horizon, a distant speck on the consciousness of a Diety. Papa Legba’s cigar fizzles out and he produces another from a pocket of the old, formless grey and dust-covered jacket he wears. He snips it with weathered teeth and it lights, magically, as his black, black eyes watch the small speck grow larger. Timeless, his patience is eternal, his station as Gatekeeper the Be All End All of Creation itself, at least as far as us mortals are concerned. Without him, we cannot move forward. We cannot experience the presence, without his intervention on our behalf with the greater hierarchies and regiments of the Divine. As I draw near him, Papa Legba’s face breaks out in a cracked and weathered grin, his voice is raspy and deep as the rivers as he says, ‘Welcome back, boi. What’chu got ta say fuh yo’sef this time.’

Since the only experience I can speak on authoritatively is my own, the conclusions that I come to in blogs such as these apply to me only. If, by some extraordinary coincidence someone else’s experience is of a similar sort, perhaps the nature of my conclusion might bear some relevancy to their lives as well. If so, such statistical improbabilities are probably meaningless curiosities in an otherwise logical and rationally-oriented universe, the aforementioned stated with tongue firmly in cheek.

Every transition we make is a Crossroad, and involves spiritual/psychic/psychological communication between our rational/irrational, conscious/unconcious and spiritual/material sides, and so every transition we make is a communication between Self and Diety, whether we realize it consciously or not. In order to move forward in health and vigor, all aspects of the past must be reconciled with the future or else they remain suppressed in compartmentalized voids within our personality/ego structures. There, they fester like old wounds and draw energy to them, taking it from our Present and creating justifications and intentions that befoul our highest aspirations, that twist our good will into something selfish and perverse, proving the truism that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Within the highest of all spiritual aspirants, there remains a mortal seed. Yin and Yang each contain a seed of thier opposition, representing the true equality of dark and light, the manifestation of a perfect relationship, a necessary realization of the total aspect of Creation. One without the other, cannot exist. I, without you, in this world, cannot be whole. We are One, dark and light, black and white. Opposition challenged, fought and resisted, is strengthened. As in the final chapter of the Matrix Trilogy, when Neo realized that he could not fight Mr. Smith, but must instead realize his inherent duality – represented Arujuna on the battlefield with Krishna, Jesus in the desert with Satan, Buddha in the forest with Mara – we each must integrate and accept our inherent duality, thereby mirroring this universal battle within ourselves, as in the expression, “As Above, So Below.”

Transitions are the flow of life, the necessary condition of existence that makes experience possible, that takes us from one state of consciousness to another. So often, they pass unremarked upon, although, at the moment of their occurence, we each experience an extraordinary clarity, where we know that something momentous has just happened, where we realize something, before allowing it to fade from our conscious mind and permitting the mental chatter and egoistic formation of past/future existence to return to its predominant function of running our lives.

My own transitions leading up to the present were marked by turmoil, mental and spiritual, and, often, material. Through them, I realized that the core disfunction of my personality construct was on the run, and, baby, when your Ego is on the run, guess what it does, it turns around and attacks you, the best defense being a good offense. And who knows you better than your Ego? It will present your most alluring temptations to you, offered up like a spring pig on a platter (or a fig leaf-encrusted soy platter, for the vegetarians), your greatest material or sensual desires will suddenly appear out of nowhere and your deepest, darkest passions will arise like a bat out of the pits of Hell to confront you in the midst of your devotional practices, distracting you, pulling you back down into the Ego’s grasp.

The servant has become the Master. Instead of being an event that frees you from the past, transitions become occasions for the Ego to tighten its grip upon your consciousness, upon your true Self, which lies beneath, forever observing, emotionless and steady, the core expression of who you are in this incarnation and those beyond. Only by cultivating the Now through the many, many specific practices available (meditation upon the breath, visualization, mantras, prayers, quiet time), going within to find out who you really are, can we overcome the habit of allowing our Ego to remain in control, our thoughts to remain unstructured and typified by useless, banal chatter.

The lives we have created around ourselves act as a barrier most times to truly getting to know ourselves, and this is an intentional device that the Ego uses to strengthen it’s grip upon us. Death to the Ego is really acceptance of the Ego as a tool of the Self. Not giving the Ego power, not listening to the worries and fears, not allowing them to settle and take root or to grow tendrils of intention that reach out into all aspects of our lives, perverting our present by creating more negative kharma that will only end up repeating the same old cycle, over and over again, if we allow it to. The way out of this trap has been known since the beginning of time, but it is only by going within, that we can change what goes on without.

Papa Legba awaits each of us and we all, in our own way, seek him out. Whether it be at the bottom of a bottle of rum, or the highest mountain in the Himalayas. Whether we be Buddhist or Pentacostal Christian, Hindu or Sunni Muslim, Animist or Philosophical Diest, the power that Papa Lega represents is real and transcends culture and spiritual affiliation. Whether we acknowledge this particular belief system or not, we cannot trick ourselves. The alien formation of Ego structure can and often will attempt to downplay the reality of the spiritual, our responsibility to the collective human family and the greater trends of positivity that might awaken the selflessness of our peculiar human nature. But beneath the Ego’s selfish rationalizations, our true voices whisper constantly, reminding us that there is more to our lives than that which we want, or desire. That our purpose is greater, that we are called to Glory, no matter our personal situations, or what we can or cannot do, according to our own interpretations and understandings of what we, as individuals, are capable of in life.
Nobody holds you back but yourself. Only I hold myself back. Only you do too.

As I stand there at the crossroads, Papa Legba grows ferocious in aspect, his black, black eyes all-encompassing, growing in my awareness, drawing me in, further and further, becoming swirling black whirlpools of intention and destiny, and I am sucked into a void of eternal light, within which total consciousness exists. Around me I hear voices, of loved ones and strangers, an echoing chorus of laughter and light, of pain and suffering, of life and love, of experience and desire realized. My soul opens, my secrets exposed, I cry out to the multiverse surrendering myself to All That Is and Ever Shall Be, knowing now that my life was never my own in the first place, that I am but a part of the Whole, a singular thought in the Mind of God, an echo of a shadow of a reflection of an infinite collectivity that is One. 

Abruptly, I am returned to myself, standing alone at the Crossroads, the litter of ashes and cigar butts, and three, empty bottles of rum accompanied only by the echo of Papa Legba’s laughter, born on the desolate, whispering wind of encroaching night. Freed of all encumberances, I laugh out loud, listening to the sound of my life lived Now, and Forevermore.

Modern Day Mystics and the Blissful Ignorance Theory of Existence

This is the time of the modern-day mystic. As life continues to complicate for those who are struggling to keep up with the Joneses, the world shifts around them. Watching the news, listening to the conversations of those on the trains and in the bars and restaurants reveals the extent of the general confusion with which events in the world are being met. As nuclear reactors melt down in Japan, record breaking earthquakes, tornadoes and floods affect the workings of humankind, people continue to go about their daily business as if tomorrow is going to be the same as yesterday and today is an aberration, to be remarked upon in passing, but not to be heralded as the sign of some fundamental change in the way that the world works.

The modern-day mystics are those who live life as it comes to them. Those with a deeper understanding of the flow of life and events, who see the meaning behind seemingly mundane and coincidental events and who draw supernatural conclusions from these events, pertaining to themselves, their paths in the world and the destiny of that world as one holistic, interconnected expression of one consciousness. To those around them who are not so inclined, they may seem to be crazy, or irresponsible, or uncaring. They may seem to exemplify the characteristics of the Tarot Fool, who carries all he owns in a bag on a stick, slung over his shoulder, his eyes to the heavens as he seems to be about to step off of a cliff, while a bolt of lightning appears to be about to strike him from behind. And this is, to a large extent, how the modern-day mystics live, trusting in what seem to be intangible forces of fate and coincidence to take care of them, to guide them in some way along a path that appears only as each step is taken, with no security or safety offered in exchange for this seemingly blind trust.

The modern-day mystics struggle for understanding at first, try to explain themselves to their family members and friends, often to no avail. This lifestyle does not make any sense in the world they reside in, the world of bills and 9-5 jobs, of mortgages and car payments, of Friday night outings, church, mowing the lawn and barbeque’s every other Sunday. They undergo the castigation of those closest to them, the pain of necessary separation as their path has diverged from that of the majority of those still living under a failing system of social and governmental control. The modern-day mystic struggles to find his or her way, struggling to come to terms with the new idea of living without boundaries, without security and often, without support or understanding from anyone other than those like them. As they make their way through the twilight world of the margins of society, they may encounter characters embarked upon the darker paths of the soul, but their light always shines through and they are protected from harm, sometimes in seemingly miraculous or coincidental ways, always finding a path through situations that often only appeared because they are beings of light, whose intentions are of the highest degree. And they watch, always and lovingly, as those they care for struggle with the demands of a vampiric system of existence based upon a death-culture, innimcal to growth and prosperity of any outside of those who have bought into the system tooth and nail.

The depth of the denial is staggering. The mainstream media, governments, groups and individuals are consciously choosing ignorance over knowledge in what seems to be the desperate hope that by concentrating upon ephemeral political and social tropes that the majority of people will sit complacently in their armchairs and watch their news and reality shows, content to trust in their leaders’ infallible authority and the certain knowledge that they have the people’s best interests at heart. The truth regarding the secretive elite cabals, the manipulations of the monetary and political systems, the overt cultural and racial domination and genocides, the corruption and sheer expressions of evil and debauchery is available in books, articles and on innumerable websites.  The information regarding the poisionous food, the poisonous air and the poisonous water is also readily available to all who wish to know it. And yet, those who desperately need the comfort and faux-stability of their jobs and social groupings grab on to the faintest strands of rationalization in order to justify their obtuse reliance upon the Blissful Ignorance Theory of Existence, or, the What You Choose Not To Know Hopefully Can’t Harm You Lifestyle. 

The modern-day mystics shine like stars to those who know them, even as they fail the socially-constructed criterion of successful indoctrination and assimilation into the System. The goodness of their hearts is explained away as naivety, the compassion they feel for others, as innocence, their insistence upon living their lives their own way and not following the path of systemic servitude leading to an early death and spiritual dissolution, their selfishness and, perhaps even, insanity. And yet, the modern-day mystics understand these rationalizations and explanations as necessary talking-points for their family members and friends who have to explain away their lifestyle choices to themselves, as well as their friends and other family members who are also lost in the System. But this is the way it always has been, for all those who have found themselves unable to exist within the constraints of a society that stifles rather than revels in true creativity, that controls rather than releases the bonds of expression, that hides rather than reveals the secrets of the Ages and that lies rather than tells the truth about the world and what exactly is going on.

The modern-day mystics know the time. They know what is going on, because they not only pay attention to the stars, the clouds, the trees and the animals, but they pay attention to what they feel inside, what their intuition tells them, what their Angels, Ancestors and Guides show them about the world and what lies beyond. The modern-day mystics are equally comfortable with quantum physics and the kabbalah, the bible or the Vedas, meditation techniques or prayers, the necessity of laughter for a healthy life and the necessity for tears, sometimes. The modern-day mystics are familiar with the latest news about Disclosure, as well as the underlying meaning of messages that the Elite share with the world, but that most are too close-minded to choose to hear. They understand that not everybody seeks knowledge or a way to successfully navigate the world with your spirit intact, and they also understand that that is ok and the way things are supposed to be.

And this, in the end, is the key. The fact that the modern-day mystics understand that life Is, in the Now, in each instant, a gift, something special to be remarked upon and cherished for exactly what it seems to be, with no illusions or preconceptions obscuring the pure perfection of existence lived in the moment. That plans and dreams often come to naught, it is the journey that matters and not the goal, and that there is, really, no such thing as lasting peace or security in this world and that, in fact, that is the beauty and perfection of it and if there were security, if there were lasting peace, then there would be no reason to come here at all, since the journey is about growth and about lessons and about challenging the Self and its limitations in order to transcend them on the way back to where we all came from in the first place, beyond words, beyond thought, beyond bodies, beyond conception.

We all possess the potential to become modern-day mystics if we choose to do so. But often, the path to that lifestyle lies through the dregs of pain and heartache, of agony and the pure grief of total personal destruction. You must die to your previous self in order to truly become someone else. And most people are not willing to do that without some external push that makes it so. But sometimes, that push comes from within and the life-choices that we make lead us invariably to a point where we must determine who we are and what we are living for, what our contribution to Creation is to be, and what we are willing to sacrifice in order to manifest it. Once that determination is made though, and the path embarked upon, there is no turning back, no reentering the matrix, no asking for forgiveness and attempting to put that three-piece or pants suit back on, because the System recognizes its own and destroys those it knows are not of it.

But that’s alright, mystic. You walk upon the pathless path, written in the stars and cast upon far shores and distant lands of mystical beauty and delight, and Eternity is your destiny, the Infinite, your transitory resting place for there is no death, no End and no Beginning. You are, We are, All is, Forever and Ever … insert your choice of declaration of affirmation here.